Book Review: Scientific History: Experiments in History and Politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the End of the Cold War

sIn October 1993, Douglass North and Robert William Fogel won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for having renewed research in economic history. The two men, who have often been described as the fathers of “the new economic history” (also called “econometric history” or “cliometrics”), were honored for having turned the quantified and mathematical tools of modern economics to its historical studies. In the 1960s, thinking with operationally defined variables, usage of statistical data, and formal modeling became a trend in economic history. But the new historiographical approach was neither restricted to economic history nor a brand-new innovation. As Elena Aronova shows in her book, during the 1960s quantitative methods gained wide currency in many disciplines, and they relied on ideas about scientific knowledge and methods that had a long history. Even though these ideas varied over time and place, their protagonists shared the belief that historical research should implement a broad range of resources including those coming from the natural sciences. Aronova characterizes the related programs as “scientific history.” “Scientific history,” she observes, is a “shorthand for the diverse ways in which scientists and historians reconciled the techniques, approaches, and values of science with the writing of history” (p. 4). But scientists also borrowed knowledge and methods from historians, either in the context of particular scientific research activities or when they studied the history of science.sElena Aronova first trained in biochemistry and then became a professional historian of science. Hence, the subject matter of her book is informed by an intuition that is based on her own personal experience, namely that there is no radical difference between the sciences and the humanities (as philosophers such as Wilhem Dilthey proposed). On the contrary, Aronova observes, there are...